Bob Packwood's Redemption Story

“I find people in the political arena are very understanding and forgiving,” former Oregon Senator Bob Packwood told me recently. We were talking about his life these days, his comfortable recovery from the tawdry headlines of 20 years ago that forced him from his job in Congress. Given the successful lobbying career that the former Republican lawmaker continues to enjoy at 81, there’s substantial evidence to support his contention about Washington being a land of redemption—even absolution.

There was, after all, a lot to be forgiven when Packwood left the Senate. His drawn-out downfall came after the emergence of a good many stories of sexual harassment directed at staffers and lobbyists. One woman who worked in his office said Packwood suddenly kissed her on the neck. Soon after, he followed her into a room, stood on her feet, pulled her ponytail and tried to yank down her girdle. The woman escaped but he threatened her, saying, “If not today, some other day.” She resigned.

It wasn’t just accusations of his randy behavior that ended his lawmaking career. Packwood kept a diary in which he damned himself, writing with incredulity about being rebuffed once by an employee in the copy room. “She made this big stink about it,” Packwood wrote. “I have one question—if she didn’t want me to feather her nest, why did she come into the Xerox room? Sure, she used that old excuse that she had to make copies of the Brady Bill, but if you believe that, I have a room full of radical feminists you can boff.”

After the diary was subpoenaed by the Senate Ethics Committee, it was discovered that Packwood had removed some incriminating material, including threats to his colleagues (ever the confessor, he wrote in the journal about making the edits). In the end, he said, he was a victim of “dogmatic women,” and wrote in his diary that he didn’t know what all the fuss was about. “I am accused of kissing women,” Packwood wrote, “on occasion of perhaps overeagerly kissing women, and that is the charge—not drugging, not robbing, kissing.”

The committee took a different view of his profligate affections and recommended unanimously that he be expelled from the Senate for ethics violations. Packwood went ahead and announced his resignation in October of 1995, leaving Congress as a “pariah in his state,” observed the New York Times. But while the lion’s share of the negative publicity focused on the senator’s sexual appetites, his promiscuity of a different kind—with Washington’s lobbyists—was also remarkable. In one instance documented in the diary,he arranged to have a cash retainer paid to his then-wife by a lobbyist; in another entry, he pledged to a lobbyist working for Shell Oil that he’d pass a special oil tax bill to thank him for raising campaign cash. “Ron, I still hate the oil companies,” he told the gentleman, “but I’ll do you a favor.”

Indeed, Packwood was in a good position to do favors. The chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, he had spent his career serving as one of those now-extinct species called a liberal Republican, currying favor with friends on both sides of the aisle—and growing powerful with the lobbying community. A spokeswoman for Shell once acknowledged in an interview that the company hired a particular lobbyist because it believed he had “a way to get in and meet with” Packwood’s top staffers. Another lobbyist, according to Packwood’s diary, once told the senator that he could offer Packwood’s wife $37,500 for five years of part-time work, adding, “If you’re chairman of the Finance Committee I can probably double that,” Packwood then became chairman of the committee, though he had his sights set on an even better job. He confided to his diary that he dreamed of working on K Street, hoping one day to “become a lobbyist at five or six or four hundred thousand” dollars annually.

He did better. Soon after departing office amid the diary scandal, Packwood founded the Sunrise Research Corporation, a lofty-sounding one-man-lobbying shop that has routinely made as much as $1 million per year for that one man, who works on issues ranging from health care to food regulations to tax policy. “My clients have come from across the political spectrum, from the AFL-CIO to United Airlines to the Court of Ohio,” he told me, explaining that he finds a way to be useful to all comers.

By any measure, life is pretty good for Packwood these days. He spends half the year in Washington—about 80 percent of the time Congress is in session—and the balance of his days in the posh Portland suburb of Dunthorpe. As a lobbyist does, he fills the weeks he’s in D.C. trudging up to Capitol Hill to buttonhole congressional staffers or lawmakers. The work reminds him not of his own days in Congress, but of his first career. “It’s similar to my time as a lawyer,” he says, explaining how he discerns what his clients could benefit from on the Hill and then presses their interests vigorously (“in clear, Anglo-Saxon language”). His old connections and his once-powerful perch count for very little in his new line of work, Packwood would have me believe. “There really is very little legalized bribery inside or outside Congress,” he says, and his tone is even and earnest as he says it. “I find people vastly overrate the importance of money and power.”

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While Packwood may or may not be correct, his own success as a lobbyist suggests we overestimate something else entirely: the degree to which a scandal impedes a former member of Congress. Rather than slink away from Washington—and the local notoriety of their sins—plenty of lawmakers who’ve exited office under less-than-ideal circumstances have, perhaps not surprisingly, found soft landings on K Street. For instance, Senator Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican who left office after a notorious incident with an undercover cop in a bathroom stall in 2007, promptly took up work as a lobbyist, launching a firm called New West Strategies, which has earned north of $200,000 working on behalf of Murray Energy Corporation of Ohio and the veterans group Operation Military Family. Last year, he took in more than $150,000 representing Western Pacific Timber. “When you have significant experience in Congress, it’s assumed you’ll have clients come to you automatically,” he told a reporter. “But that’s not the case, you have to hustle, and you always hustle.”

Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer to Salon and the Christian Science Monitor.